


Perfection is a Perspective

by blythechild



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship/Love, Hurt/Comfort, Male-Female Friendship, Psychological Trauma, Romantic Friendship, Self-Doubt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-12
Updated: 2012-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-31 01:40:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/pseuds/blythechild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An unexpectedly brutal crime scene realigns Reid's perspective about working at the F.B.I.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfection is a Perspective

**Author's Note:**

> This was a response to a picfor1000 challenge on Livejournal, where the prompts were the word "perfect" and an image of an old barn door. Sadly, after I wrote and edited this piece, it was still 1000 words over the challenge's 1000 word limit. I was considerably bummed out. But I have decided that it deserves to see the light of day anyway. Brevity is overrated.
> 
> As this is a work of fanfiction, it is implicit that I do not own the rights to any of the characters herein. This was created as a personal entertainment. This story contains mature themes and is not suitable for readers under the age of 14.

Clear moments rise up before him offering split seconds of peace in the chaos. The crunch of gravel under his feet. Flashes of blue and red against the trees beyond the farm fence. The crisp pleat of a Statey’s trouser leg. But they are just moments, and in between them are the images that he can’t control. A blood drop falling into an already congealing puddle. The precise outlines for tools along a particleboard wall. Torn cuticles caked with layers of dirt and bodily fluids – a strange oxidized brown.

All behind the red door.

His chest tightens again. He starts to wheeze audibly. A faceless state trooper appears in front of him with a paramedic in tow.

“You okay, Dr. Reid? Here, sit down, man…”

He waves them off – they can’t do anything for him. “I’m… I’m fine. Really.”

“There’s blood - ” the paramedic starts.

“It’s not mine.”

“Let’s be certain of that, shall we?” The paramedic tunes him out while beginning her cursory exam, so he returns the favor and ignores her in kind. He feels bodiless and disconnected – standard symptoms of shock – but his disconnection is combined with a full body panic that he is finding harder to suppress by the minute. He is overcome by the need to scream – release the internal pressure like a steam valve – except he feels so full, so tainted, that he wants to unhinge his jaw to get it all out. He wants to separate bone from muscle and tendons – he wants some of the blood on him to be his own. Pain will make it better. Or oblivion. His fingers start to twitch uncontrollably and he wonders if the paramedic has opiates in her kit. He wonders if she could be distracted long enough for him practice a little slight of hand.

He is aware that the paramedic has stopped moving. Was she speaking to him? It’s funny that he didn’t hear her, even as background noise. He can hear the strangest things. A cruiser 100 yards away has a squeak in the left back door hinge. One of the men from the medical examiner’s office catches his finger while unfolding a stretcher. He curses under his breath in Portuguese. The paramedic checks his ears with an otoscope.

“He didn’t have a gun,” he mumbles.

“Pardon?”

“He didn’t fire a gun in there, so I don’t have tinnitus.”

“But you fired one.”

“The shape of the room, and the stone of the walls closely resemble the conditions of a standard firing range, at which I practice regularly. Therefore the aural risks would be no greater than those of an experience that I go through often and without adverse side effects.” For the first time he focused on the paramedic’s face. Grey eyes with an outer rim of green. “My hearing is fine.”

“Are you always like this?” She said after a moment. “’Cause I’m trying to figure out how deeply in shock you are, or if you’re just…”

“Weird?” he offered.

“Yeah, weird.”

He sighed and looked away. “I’m mostly weird.”

He found himself looking back at the red door. He imagined it as the mouth to a giant stone beast, made red by the lives it consumed and the relish that it took in that activity. 

_“Morgan and I will take the front; Prentiss and Rossi will cover the back. Reid, take up post by the barn so that you have a clear view of the entire farmhouse. Be our eyes and keep your radio open.”_

No one thought about the barn. It didn’t fit into the profile; this was a straight-up collector/power-reassurance rapist. The barn would have been dehumanizing to his victims and therefore irrelevant. He couldn’t ever remember a time when their profile had been so wrong. When the state troopers saw her, heard her screaming through broken teeth and a chewed off tongue, one of them promptly threw up all over the crime scene. He tried to calm her but she was past seeing, past hearing, past all rational thought. When the medics arrived and discovered that her skin had bonded to her restraints, he turned and walked away until he was stopped at the end of the driveway. He hadn’t even bothered to holster his weapon, and everyone had been too busy to mention it to him. He looked up from the .38 dangling in his hand to see her walking from the red door. She grew darker and bigger until finally her face coalesced into someone he recognized. 

She reached down, sliding her hand along the length of his arm until it clasped his gun. 

“Hey.” She smiled a little smile that she reserved for the two of them, and gently pulled his gun from his hand. She checked it, and tucked it back in the saddle holster that sat on his hip. Her eyes were huge and dark; not like the girl’s reduced to pinholes of fear in rolling white like a dying animal.

“The locals will need that.” He croaked. “Ballistics.”

“Later.” She took his hand in hers and kneaded the pressure points between his thumb and forefinger. “Are you thinking about using?”

She was whispering but he didn’t care who heard them. “Yes.” He tried to swallow down the panic in his throat and felt that he might gag. The urge to scream until he passed out returned in force. His fingers increased their twitching while Emily’s fingers dug deeper into his.

“Focus on your breath. Find one thing to look at and let it be everything. Then just breathe and see, breathe and see...”

She was wearing a necklace – so unlike her – a small garnet was resting in the basin of her suprasternal notch. Every time she breathed it winked a little as it caught the light. Like a perfect drop of blood, crystallized, and resting in a smooth desert. He closed his eyes and then reopened them to the same perfect image. He concentrated on it and soon saw a maze of light freckles, invisible from a distance, dancing around the beautiful drop as it rocked back and forth with her breathing. The desert was marred yet still lovely, and tranquil. He found himself breathing deeply and pushing his panic into a corner of himself. He imagined steel bars caging it, Plexiglas muffling it’s screams, and an electrified fence denying it dreams of escape. He heard the tumblers fall into place, he felt the keys drop into his pocket, he imagined himself walking away…

“Better?”

“Hmmmm.” He opened his eyes.

“What did you focus on?”

“A desert.”

“Oh, good. For a moment there I thought that you were staring at my chest…”

He looked away and felt a blush colour his cheeks. “But what I saw was a desert…”

He heard her laughing. “I don’t care what you were staring at, Reid – you do what you have to do.”

“I’m never going to forget this place, am I?” He watched as the laughter faded from her. “No matter how many more crime scenes I work, no matter how senile I get as an old man, no matter how much analysis I do - _this_ won’t ever be less horrific, will it?”

“No.” She was squeezing his hand like it was a lifeline. He wasn’t sure who was saving whom.

Two medical examiner’s employees clattered a stretcher past them across the gravel. A sheet was draped over its contents. A large hand slid out from under the drape as it passed them.

“The girl?” He asked suddenly.

Emily shook her head. “Died of shock. One of the paramedics said that to achieve _that_ level of malnutrition and emaciation, she might have been there for a year. He kept her body alive, but just barely. There’s also evidence of others. They’re gonna be tearing apart this crime scene for weeks.”

“The profile was wrong.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice.

“Yes, but that’s because of all of us, Reid. None of us imagined this.”

“But that’s our job, Emily – we’re supposed to imagine this sort of nightmare and get in front of it. How could we all have missed the signs?”

“I don’t know,” Emily reached out and pulled him closer so that they were eye to eye, “but you got him, Spencer. He’s taken his last girl. And, even if we had profiled him as… as _this_ … it still wouldn’t have saved that girl in the barn, and you _know_ that. Her mind died a long time ago.”

Panic bellowed from behind the cage walls and rammed itself against the bars. It wanted to crawl up into him, where it was warm and dark, and make itself at home. It wanted to control his every move and craft his every thought for him. It wanted so much that it was taking his breath away even while it was still safely caged. He closed his eyes and tried to focus. A groan escaped him but was silenced as her lips covered his.

He stood completely still as warmth overtook him. He couldn’t think now if his life depended on it – maybe that was her intention. Her hand curled around the back of his neck and into his hair while her other hand held his shoulder and pulled him nearer. It seemed forever before his hand found its way to curve above her hip. When she pulled away she appeared completely calm, as if it was an everyday occurrence that she kiss him at a crime scene.

“Do you want to know what terrifies me?” she asked.

“Tell me.” They were still holding each other while the scene unfolded around them preoccupied with its own horror.

“Doyle.”

“But he’s dead…”

“I know, but the things I saw him do in life, forcing myself to act like he was someone I loved knowing that my life was over if I wasn’t convincing…” Terror crept into her face and for the first time he thought about what it would be like to face your personal demon everyday, alone. “I have nightmares about him. He’s 15 feet tall and he tears my friends in half while I beg him to take me instead. Then he comes for me – wherever I run – and he stabs me but I can’t die. His fingers are sharpened wooden stakes…”

He didn’t know what to say, so he pulled her into his chest and hoped that would do.

“Do you know what I do to make the panic stop?” she mumbled into his shoulder.

“No.”

She pulled back and stroked the side of his face. “I come to work and start a new case. I remember that he’s dead and he can’t do anything to me anymore, and that if I can live through that, there’s not much out there that can defeat me. And I remember that my friends and I take monsters out of world every day so that people don’t have to dream about giants with stakes for fingers or demon butchers that hide women behind red doors.”

She kissed him again quickly. “When the panic rises, remember that you killed your monster and because the bastard is dead, there are people out there who will live out their lives and never know what horror is. _You_ did that, Spencer. Not everyone can.”

He had never considered himself a protector; he always categorized himself as a scientist, a profiler, and a detective. The mystery was the thing for him. But still, Emily’s theory took root within him. While preventing future crimes was, at best, an abstraction, it did not contradict what he knew to be true about pattern, serial offenders: they don’t stop unless an insurmountable obstacle prevents them from acting. If _he_ was the agent of one of these obstacles, not only was he saving future victims but he could consider every closed case to be a victory despite all of the misery that had occurred before. It was an intellectual shell game, but if it kept his monster caged, he’d take it. 

Emily slipped out of his arms and stepped back a pace.

“Emily…”

Purposeful footfalls ground into the gravel behind him. “Reid, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” He fixed a tight-lipped stoic expression to his face and turned to look at Hotch.

“There’s blood on you.”

“It’s not mine.”

Hotch stared at him for an uncomfortable period of time, then looked away and stepped closer. “I’m sorry, we should’ve checked the barn.”

“There was no reason to, based on our profile.”

“We’re going to have to go over every detail of this investigation to discover how that happened.”

“There is the possibility that this wasn’t an investigative error. It could be the advent of a whole new pathology – like a mutated virus strain – maybe we’ve discovered a new type of killer. There’s probably a paper in this somewhere, either way...”

Hotch looked at him. “I wish that it had been me that had gone through that door instead of you.”

“I know, but I’m handling it. I’ll be okay.”

Hotch watched him, then his eyes flicked to Emily and back to Reid. He was calculating something. Just as Reid was certain that Hotch was going to say something, he turned and walked back towards the barn. Emily walked up behind Reid. He could feel her heat along his back.

“How much did you just lie to him?”

“Only a little.” He reached back and grasped her fingers in his hand. “There probably _is_ a paper in this…”

She laughed but there wasn’t much humor in it. “You can’t fool him you know.”

“I’m not trying to. I just need some time, that’s all.”

She squeezed his hand and he turned to face her. “He’s probably worried about the both of us; he must have seen the kiss…”

“I don’t care. A really bad day can put things into perspective for you. We’ve all had a lot of bad days this past year.”

In the distance, bells rang out across the valley below them.

“What’s that?”

“It’s Sunday.” She seemed wistful. 

Somewhere in the town below, people gathered for their affirmation of faith just as they had for generations. Routine, certainty, community. Many would never know the details of what was found at the dairy farm on the hill above them, and if they did, they would think themselves changed by it, more fearful maybe. But, in truth, their lives would continue as they always had, and they would be no more affected by the monster that lived among them than by reading about a car accident in the newspaper. 

Reid felt that this was right somehow. He had contained a horror, and in the town below people were readying themselves for church, sleeping in, cooking bacon and eggs, dreaming of what they would be when they grew up… Somewhere down there a girl was worried about how to get a boy to notice her instead of surviving beyond the red door.


End file.
